BigFoot Networks Killer NIC: Killer Marketing or Killer Product?
by Gary Key on October 31, 2006 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Networking
Killer NIC Marketing Materials
Instead of rewriting the BigFoot Networks marketing materials we will just present it as is in abbreviated form. There are five features that are prominently featured on the Killer NIC website and the descriptions listed below are a quick recap of these items. We have already implied the marketing utilized by BigFoot Networks is very aggressive, and while understandable to those with a marketing background (no offense to the suits) we believe the website information and advertisements set the expectations of this card too high. A little more education about the background of the technology utilized and how it really works would have been better than in your face statements about gaming domination and free T-Shirt giveaways.
In fact, the description of MaxFPS technology along with the associated graphs in the reviewers guide we received does more to explain how the card works and why than the entire website at this time. Our suggestion to BigFoot Networks is to openly provide the technical information and remember that not everyone is a thirteen year old (not that there is anything wrong with them) gamer with $279 in hand and wanting to pimp out their rig because a Killer NIC advertisement with a limping sword makes them feel inferior in some way. All this is academic anyway; if the hardware does not work then who really cares about the marketing, right? So here's the marketing spiel:
MaxFPS - MaxFPS will increase the frames per second (FPS) in most gaming systems. It does this by reducing the CPU utilization due to networking, and speeding up the main game loops of the game. For gaming systems that have older graphics cards, the additional performance in CPU, cache, and main system memory will improve the efficiency of the card. This allows it to run at more FPS or at higher resolutions and settings. For gaming systems that have new graphics cards, the FPS performance is usually limited by the performance of the main gaming loop or the CPU's ability to get data to the card. MaxFPS will improve the speed of the main gaming loop and reduce the CPU utilization and main system memory thrashing thus improving FPS. Depending upon the situation MaxFPS will use its direct transfer of data to host application memory. Latency is further reduced by eliminating the time to write in and out of the system memory.
UltimatePing - UltimatePing will reduce the effective UDP-internal ping time (ping using UDP sockets). A UDP-internal ping is very different than a standard ICMP ping such as one might get when calling "ping" from the command line. UDP-internal ping runs over a UDP socket and includes such overhead as UDP checksum, buffer copy, real data transfer, and stack efficiency. UltimatePing is based on two technologies. First it ensures that neither your operating system nor your network card is introducing unnecessary latency into your game by ensuring interrupts from the NIC and OS are efficient. Secondarily, UltimatePing uses a side effect of MaxFPS to improve the response time in the main game loop or threads.
PingThrottle - PingThrottle is a user controlled setting that literally adds latency to any outbound network traffic, effectively increasing ping a gamer has to the server. The max latency you can add is 20ms and the latency is real as it is processed by the NPU. (The basic premise is that this will allow you to placate anyone complaining about LPBs (Low Ping B...s), although the real application of the technology can be somewhat less desirable depending on your viewpoint.)
GameFirst - GameFirst basically prioritizes your inbound and outbound network traffic so that your gaming packets are delivered or received first. This feature is very useful if you are running other applications that are uploading or downloading data while gaming.
FNA - FNA stands for Flexible Network Architecture. It is in effect the infinite flexibility of the Killer NIC. FNapps are designed to allow a user to run an application with a minimal or reduced impact on the main system's CPU, memory subsystem, or hard disk. FNapps can be anything from simple packet monitoring utilities like firewalls to full blown VoIP programs or file sharing programs like BitTorrent. FNapps can be designed to utilize the dedicated USB port as well as the Gigabit port. FNapps are designed with the included open-source Linux compiler and source code. The card includes a Linux console, 64MB of RAM, and an embedded Linux build.
The single most touted feature on the Killer NIC is the MaxFPS system that includes the LLR technology. Please note these comments as we will find out shortly if they work or not. The second most hyped feature is FNA. We believe this feature can really set this card apart from others and has the potential to be the most useful feature. Unfortunately, there are no FNapps available to test at this time. Considering the time that has passed since the card was introduced and the press material describing how easy it is to make an FNapp we would have expected something to test by now. FNapps are still MIA at this time, though we understand there might be some released over the course of the next few weeks.
UltimatePing actually worked in a few of our benchmarks. PingThrottle worked as advertised and by using it continuously during a heated Quake 4 match we were able to get kicked off the server and brandished cheaters for life. (It was fun while it lasted.) GameFirst worked but the outgoing packet prioritization worked about the same as our NVIDIA nForce 590 NIC and D-Link Gamer Lounge DGL-4100 router. The inbound capability is what makes the difference although we typically would not be caught downloading or uploading files while gaming online.
Instead of rewriting the BigFoot Networks marketing materials we will just present it as is in abbreviated form. There are five features that are prominently featured on the Killer NIC website and the descriptions listed below are a quick recap of these items. We have already implied the marketing utilized by BigFoot Networks is very aggressive, and while understandable to those with a marketing background (no offense to the suits) we believe the website information and advertisements set the expectations of this card too high. A little more education about the background of the technology utilized and how it really works would have been better than in your face statements about gaming domination and free T-Shirt giveaways.
In fact, the description of MaxFPS technology along with the associated graphs in the reviewers guide we received does more to explain how the card works and why than the entire website at this time. Our suggestion to BigFoot Networks is to openly provide the technical information and remember that not everyone is a thirteen year old (not that there is anything wrong with them) gamer with $279 in hand and wanting to pimp out their rig because a Killer NIC advertisement with a limping sword makes them feel inferior in some way. All this is academic anyway; if the hardware does not work then who really cares about the marketing, right? So here's the marketing spiel:
MaxFPS - MaxFPS will increase the frames per second (FPS) in most gaming systems. It does this by reducing the CPU utilization due to networking, and speeding up the main game loops of the game. For gaming systems that have older graphics cards, the additional performance in CPU, cache, and main system memory will improve the efficiency of the card. This allows it to run at more FPS or at higher resolutions and settings. For gaming systems that have new graphics cards, the FPS performance is usually limited by the performance of the main gaming loop or the CPU's ability to get data to the card. MaxFPS will improve the speed of the main gaming loop and reduce the CPU utilization and main system memory thrashing thus improving FPS. Depending upon the situation MaxFPS will use its direct transfer of data to host application memory. Latency is further reduced by eliminating the time to write in and out of the system memory.
UltimatePing - UltimatePing will reduce the effective UDP-internal ping time (ping using UDP sockets). A UDP-internal ping is very different than a standard ICMP ping such as one might get when calling "ping" from the command line. UDP-internal ping runs over a UDP socket and includes such overhead as UDP checksum, buffer copy, real data transfer, and stack efficiency. UltimatePing is based on two technologies. First it ensures that neither your operating system nor your network card is introducing unnecessary latency into your game by ensuring interrupts from the NIC and OS are efficient. Secondarily, UltimatePing uses a side effect of MaxFPS to improve the response time in the main game loop or threads.
PingThrottle - PingThrottle is a user controlled setting that literally adds latency to any outbound network traffic, effectively increasing ping a gamer has to the server. The max latency you can add is 20ms and the latency is real as it is processed by the NPU. (The basic premise is that this will allow you to placate anyone complaining about LPBs (Low Ping B...s), although the real application of the technology can be somewhat less desirable depending on your viewpoint.)
GameFirst - GameFirst basically prioritizes your inbound and outbound network traffic so that your gaming packets are delivered or received first. This feature is very useful if you are running other applications that are uploading or downloading data while gaming.
FNA - FNA stands for Flexible Network Architecture. It is in effect the infinite flexibility of the Killer NIC. FNapps are designed to allow a user to run an application with a minimal or reduced impact on the main system's CPU, memory subsystem, or hard disk. FNapps can be anything from simple packet monitoring utilities like firewalls to full blown VoIP programs or file sharing programs like BitTorrent. FNapps can be designed to utilize the dedicated USB port as well as the Gigabit port. FNapps are designed with the included open-source Linux compiler and source code. The card includes a Linux console, 64MB of RAM, and an embedded Linux build.
The single most touted feature on the Killer NIC is the MaxFPS system that includes the LLR technology. Please note these comments as we will find out shortly if they work or not. The second most hyped feature is FNA. We believe this feature can really set this card apart from others and has the potential to be the most useful feature. Unfortunately, there are no FNapps available to test at this time. Considering the time that has passed since the card was introduced and the press material describing how easy it is to make an FNapp we would have expected something to test by now. FNapps are still MIA at this time, though we understand there might be some released over the course of the next few weeks.
UltimatePing actually worked in a few of our benchmarks. PingThrottle worked as advertised and by using it continuously during a heated Quake 4 match we were able to get kicked off the server and brandished cheaters for life. (It was fun while it lasted.) GameFirst worked but the outgoing packet prioritization worked about the same as our NVIDIA nForce 590 NIC and D-Link Gamer Lounge DGL-4100 router. The inbound capability is what makes the difference although we typically would not be caught downloading or uploading files while gaming online.
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WileCoyote - Friday, November 3, 2006 - link
I said it's too wordy. That means take out words. Are you people for real?Frumious1 - Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - link
That post was too short. Three sentences with no real support to back it up. Lamest comment ever.Look, sorry you have poor reading skillz, but a lot of us are quite educated and like to know the WHY and HOW besides just the WHAT. My first thought was "how in the hell is this product supposed to do ANYTHING for frame rates!?" Gary answered that by looking into the details more than superficially. Oh, sure, it doesn't really deliver -- a 5% increase on a moderately high-end system is pretty silly for a $270 product -- but that it can affect frame rates at all is surprising to me. I now have hope for Windows Vista, at least on the networking stack side of things.
What's really odd is that the review is pretty clearly advising people to NOT go out and buy this "killer" product, because it just isn't that great. If I saw a review on AnandTech that bashed a product without any backing material, I'd feel I was reading something at HardOCP. Well, okay, they back up their complaints sometimes, but their testing methodology is worse than suspect. Remember the Core 2 "launch" reviews where they used a midrange GPU config to conclude that it did nothing for gaming performance?
Anyway, there seem to be quite a few new names on here for this article. Wonder how many are employed by BigFoot? It's like there are a bunch of people bashing Gary for even reviewing the product at all, another group that's bashing him for not liking the card, a third group bashing him for not being able to do a 1 page writeup, and then a few people that think: "nice review; didn't surprise me much with the results, but at least we can now know that Killer can help in certain situations, even if it's overpriced as hell."
I'm sure Gary was tested a lot more than is shown in this article. I've conversed with him in the past, and I'd wager he was pulling his hair out over this article. How many times did you write it Gary? Ten? More? I think you ought to post here and set the record straight, because my bet is that in terms of improving gaming performance the Killer NIC is as good as a NIC is going to get... which means the other NICs from Intel, 3COM, etc. are basically all as good as onboard solutions if that. There's really not much you can do to truly improve performance of a NIC for online gaming when you're looking at maybe 5ms worst case being delay added by the hardware and OS.
As I said above in an earlier comment, it would be nice to have more developers like Jon Carmac around, because he apparently knows how to already perform well without lots of extra hardware. Can't say his games are the greatest, but the Doom 3 engine and networking aspects (client/server architecture) are clearly ahead of most other FPS solutions.
WileCoyote - Wednesday, November 1, 2006 - link
I was trying to keep my comment short, simple, and to the point. I don't need to write a page defending my opinion on something as trivial as a product review. The numbers speak for themselves in this review. And it wasn't so much the quantity but rather the quality - there is little to no structure in the review. That's fact, not opinion. There is a better way to write a review - I've read hundreds of them on Anandtech.I guess my Bachelor's Degree in Anthropology from a well-respected U.S. university doesn't count for much and neither does the successful business I created/own which pays a six-figure salary.
Gary Key - Wednesday, November 1, 2006 - link
Apparently my MBA and the fact I am already retired (at 44 and doing this because I really enjoy it) does not count for very much either. LOL.....
Seriously, I am always looking to improve. How would you change the structure of the article?
Aikouka - Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - link
Being that I run an FTP server that tends to see a decent amount of internal traffic, it actually sounds like a TNIC (or simply making a dedicated server) could actually be beneficial to me. Although, I sure have no desire to pay $300 for that card when I could easily spend the money on a second video card for SLi purposes or such. Also, I know switching from single to dual-core really helped to off-set the issue of FTP uploading on the local intranet. It really won't matter as when I build a new PC next month, I'm simple setting my old PC as a dedicated server to offload those annoying tasks.Also, Mlau, there are some games where "real estate" matters. World of Warcraft is a great example of this and I'm glad that I play the game in 1650x1080, because in certain situations, there's so much junk on your screen (I may call it junk but it actually helps :P), that you need all the extra room you can get. You may be happy in 1024x768, but that gives you no right to vehemently demean people for wanting to play in higher resolutions, which doing so also provides a better quality picture without wasting resources on Anti-Aliasing. Almost all the time, enjoying a game the way the developers designed/envisioned it can be an enriching experience for the gamer.
Gary, your comment about WoW being limited to 64 FPS... I think you may've left Vertical Sync on :D. I can easily get 90FPS on my dated Athlon 64 X2 4400+ with a GeForce 6800GT OC playing in 1650x1080 with max graphics settings. Albeit, I don't get a constant 90FPS, but it can be easily attainable in non-expansive places. So yeah, if your refresh rate on your LCD/CRT was set to 60Hz, you probably would see your game hover around 60-64FPS or somwhere between that and 30FPS. I know I turned VSync off on mine as I couldn't constantly achieve 60FPS, so the game lowered my FPS to about 30 with VSync turned on. Simply turning it off raised me to an easy 45 minimum with no tearing evident. I know that in the Hillsbrad/Alterac area, I would probably get around 45-60 depending on how far into the distance I could see.
Gary Key - Wednesday, November 1, 2006 - link
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jses...">Blizzard ResponseHi,
We tried your suggestions during testing and nothing helped. We used both LCD and CRT monitors with vsync off. This was with several different video cards and Core 2 Duo/AM2 X2 processors. The frame rates were always capped to 64 until we switched to a single core processor on either system. We contacted Blizzard directly and they confirmed the dual core bug. The link above has their response on line item 6. Are you using FRAPS to capture the frame rates? If so which version please?
Thanks!!!
goinginstyle - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
I downloaded FRAPS 2.81 and sure enough my 4800+ X2 is capped at 64FPS.otherwise - Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - link
You can get an 10/100 ethernet card with a TOE dirt cheap for much less then $300 if you really want one. With most people who actuially need a TOE also demanding 10/100/1000 support, there is a glut of 10/100 TOE NICs.dijuremo - Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - link
You will probably get more out of $300 if you get a hardware raid controller for your system (Areca comes to mind) which will not only provide a speed upin storage, but also redundancy for your system. I know it does nothing for your network performance, but is money better spent which is my point.I considered getting a Killer NIC for my new system, but did not do it because of price, no PCI-Express support (Mobo only has 2 PCI slots used for sound card and HDTV tuner and has 4 PCI Express slots, one used currently for Nvidia 7950GX2), plus performance gains were not that good (I read another review of this card about a month ago elsewhere).
As for the person saying sli/xfire is useless, you are totally wrong. At 1920x1080 (using the LVM-37w3 LCD monitor - 1080p native) you need sli or xfire to have decent speeds to play games with AA and AF. If you don't play games or play at 1280x1024 or less it does not matter, but above that you really need sli or xfire.
I also agree the article was a bit too long and actually more effective that a Lunesta overdose. Not sure if the writer is trying to avoid what just happened to HEXUS where they reviewed an Alienware PC and got e-mail back from the company saying they would not get any more harware because of the bad review...
heated snail - Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - link
I don't mean to be a jerk, and I appreciate any sincere and fact-finding test/review article. However:I'm amazed, was this really a review of a basic hardware item? Because instead it reads like a mini-novel about all the difficulty the testers/reviewers had in doing their job. Is it too much to ask for a more verbally efficient writing style? About two paragraphs briefly acknowledging that this product has been hyped in the media, and acknowledging that testing was a little more difficult than usual... then get straight to the tests on page two and conclusions on page three. I can't believe how long it took to read through this whole thing with its very repetitive descriptions and self-references.